CCR Resolutions Database

There are many refugees in need of protection through resettlement who may fall outside the Convention refugee definition;

1. The situation in Afghanistan has continued to deteriorate such that from the capital city of Kabul alone over 1,000 refugees flee daily, and the country is left void of any supporting infrastructure;
2. Afghanistan remains one of the largest refugee-producing countries as a result of the continuing war;
3. The U.N. has started a process of discussion and negotiations through a U.N. delegation headed by Mahmood Mestiri with the various factions involved in the Afghan conflict;
4. Canada is internationally respected for its commitment to peace, and is seen as an important player with a strong voice at the U.N.;

1. The Canadian Council for Refugees has acted as a convenor of master agreement holders and sponsoring groups throughout the government's private sponsorship review;
2. There is a widely recognized need for improved communication between private sponsoring organizations and the government;
3. Organizations which sponsor refugees have a genuine and vested interest in the smooth running and success of the private sponsorship program;

1. The CCR has passed Resolution # 11 (Nov. 92) and Resolution #18 (Nov. 93) condemning landmines;
2. Anti-personnel landmines continue to kill or injure thousands of civilians, including refugees and returnees, especially from/in: Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Mozambique, Somalia and Sudan;
3. Landmines impose a threat to humanity by causing indiscriminate harm and suffering, and render entire regions socially, economically and agriculturally depressed, without the possibility of reconstruction and rehabilitation long after the cessation of conflict;
4. Minister Ouellet has suggested that a Canadian Task Force on Landmines be established; there is also opportunity for involvement in the examination of the Landmine Protocol (Protocol II) of the Convention on Inhumane Weapons (1980) at the Review Conference on the Convention in September 1995;
5. There is an emerging Canadian Coalition on Landmines and an International Campaign to raise public awareness on the issue of landmines;

1. The CCR is committed to promoting the rights and protection of refugee women, including refugee women at risk;
2. The Women at Risk review is complete and awaiting recommendations;
3. The CCR has developed the following recommendations within its document 'Women at Risk: Developing Recommendations':
   1. REC.1 The Canadian Women at Risk (AWR) programme should respond to women at risk. Whereas the Canadian AWR programme does not respond effectively to women in urgent need of resettlement, special mechanisms should be established, such as doing medical checks upon arrival in Canada, providing transportation grants, making use of Minister's Permits, and establishing processing timelines.

      REC.2 The AWR program should include women fleeing gender-based persecution, either in the country of origin or in the country of asylum.

      REC. 3 The Resettlement from Abroad Category should be established and used for processing AWR. The category should use the definition outlined in Specific Recommendation R7 of the report of Issue Group 3 of the 1994 Immigration Consultation.

      REC.4 The successful establishment component of admissibility criteria should be eliminated for refugees in urgent need of protection, especially refugee women.

      REC.5 Visa officers should accept and process expeditiously the referrals of Women at Risk cases from UNHCR and NGOs without an interview for the details of the persecution experience.

      REC.6 Canada should work with the UNHCR and NGOs in countries of first asylum where this will enable it to respond more effectively to refugee women at risk.

      REC.7 The training of visa officers around the issues concerning refugee women should be further improved, eg. to cover the psycho-social sequelae to trauma and expediting cases.

      REC.8 AWR programme should be managed as a separate programme within Citizenship and Immigration, enabling a more coherent implementation. All categories of women at risk should receive a transportation grant.

      REC.9 Citizenship and Immigration should implement mechanisms to measure the success of the AWR programme, which would include feedback from all programme participants. Research should be conducted on refugee women`s experiences of resettlement, including their adaptation skills and other personal resources. A monitoring system needs to be established to enable the tracking of cases from the point of referral to the end of the sponsoring period. This information would be used in visa training and the improvement of AWR policy and operations.

      REC.10 A full time position should be created within Citizenship and Immigration for the promotion and administration of the AWR programme.

      REC.11 Where no sponsors are immediately available, Canada should utilize reception centres across the country to accommodate women at risk upon arrival for an optional intensive three to six month period of healing and orientation. During this time, sponsors would be found.

      REC.12 The number of women admitted under the Women at Risk programme should increase. Canada should set an annual minimum target of the number of women it seeks to assist through the AWR programme, effective immediately.

1. The Secretary General of the United Nations, on November 18, 1994, called for a peacekeeping operation to establish security in the Rwandan refugee camps in the Kivu region of Zaire;
2. The CCR held a day on the lessons from Rwanda on November 24, 1994 at which a number of conclusions were reached;

1. The government of Canada has historically had a commitment to the resettlement of refugees from abroad and indeed this commitment is incorporated in the Immigration Act;
2. The government of Canada has a humanitarian obligation to refugees;
3. Government assistance has always been the primary program for resettlement;
4. Private sponsorship is a complementary program to government assistance and has always been understood by the voluntary sector to be an opportunity to respond to refugees above and beyond the government's commitment;
5. Refugee concerns have been separated from immigration concerns in the ten-year framework;
6. The formation of the "NGO-government Committee on Private Sponsorship" could result in a shift in government practice away from Canada's commitment to the admission of refugees;

1. The collapse of the Communist regime in Afghanistan did not bring a lasting solution to that country, as was proposed in the UN peace plan that was never implemented, but rather precipitated a more brutal war between rival extremist warlords resulting in heavy civilian casualties, thousands more internally displaced, a new wave of over 100,000 refugees on the Pakistani border and a severe escalation of human rights abuses (as reported in the most recent 1994 publication of Amnesty International);
2. The UN repatriation programme for Afghan refugees has become an international embarrassment and a gross failure;
3. Recent UNHCR reports run contrary to the findings of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan and inappropriately suggest that Afghans are not in need of resettlement abroad;
4. Afghan refugees constitute the largest refugee population in the world, but Canadian government sponsorship of Afghans had come to a halt until the recent agreement mentioned below, and the rejection rate for private sponsorship is over 90%;
5. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration recently negotiated a joint resettlement agreement signed by Sergio Marchi and Mr Aziz Bhaloo, President of the Ismaili Council of Canada and FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance Canada;
6. The CCR has raised concerns over Afghan refugees in conversations with the Immigration Department numerous times without any results;

1. Genocide is going on in various parts of the world by the governments, armies, paramilitary and civil forces;
2. Refugees are victims and survivors of and witnesses to genocides;
3. The present international legal mechanisms cannot adequately address the widespread perpetration of genocide today, notably as it affects girls and women, by means of rape in war;
4. The United Nations has recently begun to discuss the failure of international mechanisms to respond adequately to the crime of genocide;

1. The Women at Risk Programme has been under review as an integrated part of the general gender consultation, with involvement from the CCR ad hoc committee examining the Women at Risk Programme, women resettled pursuant to the Women at Risk Programme, sponsors, UNHCR, immigration officers, visa officers, and settlement counsellors;
2. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration has repeatedly acknowledged that the Women at Risk programme, the pride of Canada, was specifically established to respond to the immediate protection needs of refugee women and that the Programme has not adequately met its goals and needs improvement;
3. The UNHCR and the CCR ad hoc committee examining the Women at Risk Programme in their research findings confirm the necessity of changing the eligibility criteria to respond to vulnerable refugee women in need of urgent protection, including women experiencing gender-related persecution;
4. The high proportion of stream B cases being processed under the Women at Risk Programme has made the Programme a misnomer by processing cases that fit the general Joint Assistance Programme profile thereby negatively impacting on those women in need of immediate protection who are at risk;
5. In the Proposals for Action from the Consultations on Gender Issues and Refugees, the implementation of the IRB guidelines for overseas selection and the development of regulations for the Resettlement from Abroad category are listed as actions to be taken immediately. Their immediate implementation will address some of the concerns around the eligibility criteria for selecting women for refugee resettlement, including the Women at Risk Programme;
6. The current successful establishment component of the admissibility criteria of the refugee resettlement programme, which includes the Women at Risk Programme, is gender-biased, penalizing women refugees for systemic disadvantages which women have encountered world-wide, is an inappropriate measurement and is contradictory with the overall goal of the humanitarian refugee programme, including the Women at Risk Programme;
7. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration on behalf of the Department released a Declaration of Refugee Protection for Women on June 1, 1994 at the CCR recognizing the "need to overcome traditional male-oriented views of the potential of refugees for `successful establishment'" and the summary of findings of the Women at Risk Programme review presented to the CCR on June 2, 1994 notes that programme partners have called for the relaxing or elimination of the successful establishment component of the admissibility criteria;

1. The government of Iran has struck two separate extradition treaties with the governments of Turkey and Pakistan;
2. Pakistan and Turkey are so-called "first countries of asylum" for refugees fleeing from Iran;
3. It was reported widely and confirmed by Amnesty International that in return for 14 alleged Kurdish political activists extradited to Turkey, the government of Turkey has extradited at least on one occasion 6 UNHCR refugees to Iran;

1. The UNHCR and other NGOs who identify and refer Women at Risk cases to Canadian visa posts abroad have gathered adequate information on the referred cases;
2. Numerous sources confirm that interviewing a woman for the details of her story of persecution can be an act of traumatization, and that further interviews are unnecessary and re-traumatizing;
3. The November 1993 CCR Gender Consultations noted the importance of visa officers accepting referrals of Women at Risk cases using their discretion not to interview for the details of their persecution;
4. In the restructuring of the Canadian visa posts visa officers have been advised to use their discretionary authority to decrease the number of interviews;

1. The United States continues to return Haitians picked up in international waters directly to Haiti;
2. Previous CCR resolutions of May '92 and Nov. '92 have called upon the Canadian government to
   1. Support the UNHCR statement of May '92 criticizing US actions against Haitian asylum seekers;
   2. Make representations to the US not to return Haitians to Haiti; and
   3. Select a certain number of Haitians for resettlement in Canada;
3. The Canadian government has not publicly responded to these demands;
4. The United States is now putting forward a plan involving other governments for processing Haitian refugees in the Caribbean region;

1. At the refugees and development sessions there was considerable interest in continued activity around these issues;
2. A significant barrier to coordinated assistance to refugees and the internally displaced in countries of asylum/origin is the separation of responsibilities and different funding criteria within departments and between government ministries;

1. The crisis in Rwanda persists and a special workshop on the subject was requested at the CCR conference;
2. The genocide and massacres which began on April 6 have to date caused 500,000 victims and displaced more than 2,000,000 people and the numbers are continuing to grow;
3. Inordinate numbers of refugees are pouring into the countries neighbouring Rwanda;
4. The people of Rwanda are suffering a humanitarian tragedy and a social and economic crisis without historical precedent;
5. The UN forces left Rwanda just as the genocide was launched, leaving the civilian population at risk, thus encouraging the army and the militia to massacre and calling into question their credibility
6. There is considerable media misinformation suggesting that the war in Rwanda is ethnic, while in fact it is political;

1. The Canadian government is a signatory of and contributor to the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) regarding the situation of Indochinese refugees;
2. The application of the CPA in Southeast Asian refugee camps, as it now stands, leads to:
   1. human rights abuses which affect the safety and dignity of asylum-seekers in the camps and result in many genuine refugees being wrongly denied refugee status;
   2. deaths of many innocent lives;
   3. forced repatriation;
   4. deprivation measures imposed upon the camp populations;
   5. the birth of a dangerously convenient international precedent which aims to eliminate a refugee situation rather than to resolve it;

1. The combination of eligibility criteria for overseas refugee processing confirming the person is either a Convention Refugee or a member of a Designated Class and the admissibility criteria based on immigration criteria is a contradiction of the humanitarian and protection focus of the refugee programme;
2. The combination of the eligibility and admissibility criteria, named above, causes the particular exclusion of women, who suffer from a gender bias in any test based on economic achievement. Sociologist Monica Boyd writes of the triple disadvantage immigrant women face in the job market - gender, nationality and race - which is further compounded by the refugee experience;
3. The Adjustment Assistance Programme is a source of immigration funds available to support government and jointly sponsored refugees. Refugee levels take into account the budget requirements. Until most recently AAP funds were used to assist indigent immigrants, whose cases and the policy for selection is the responsibility of the immigration (not refugee) section, thereby negatively impacting on the fact that Canada has repeatedly fallen short in its overseas government-assisted refugee resettlement levels;
4. Refugees in need of protection processed for entry to Canada are frequently denied a transportation loan based on a projection of "inability to repay the loan". The transportation loan system must be administered consistent with the policy objectives of the refugee programme i.e. protection;
5. The issue of the separation of refugee humanitarian programmes and budget is listed as the fifth of five major topics to be referred to the broad consultations on immigration;

1. Aung San Su Kyi remains under house arrest following her victory in the democratic elections of 1989
2. The SLORC continues to disregard human rights and the outcome of the 1989 democratic elections;
3. Since 1988 large numbers of Burmese nationals have been both internally and externally displaced;
4. The Royal Thai government is failing to provide protection to Burmese nationals and their conditions continue to deteriorate;
5. International attention and pressure have been conspicuously absent;
6. There is both an overseas need and a sponsorship interest in increasing the current immigration levels;

1. The UNHCR estimates that 80% of the world's refugees are women and their dependants;
2. Women refugees comprise a high proportion of the refugee camp populations;
3. As a result of the gender consultations the need for gender proportionality in Canada's resettlement activities and the possibility of establishing targets for 1995 has been recognized and referred as a major topic to the broad consultation on immigration;
4. Between 1985 and 1991 women comprised only 23% of the principal applicants of the refugees landed in Canada;
5. Women refugees face various obstacles throughout the process of overseas selection, admission and integration in Canada. The strong emphasis on immigration criteria uses inappropriate measurement tools to assess a woman's ability to successfully establish in Canada;

1. From mid-August to early September, Canada asked Somali asylum-seekers in Kenya having close links to Canada (including brothers and sisters), to identify themselves for the Canadian resettlement program;
2. This raised high expectations among residents in the southeastern camps where the notices appeared;
3. Somali Canadians have as a result been pressured by relatives in these camps to put in undertakings;
4. This has caused great frustration in the community for those unable to make these commitments. In addition, the fact that the CIC officers knew nothing of these notices, and denied their existence, added confusion to frustration;

1. The Canadian government is participating in UN discussions preparing a conference document for the International Conference on Population and Development to take place in Cairo, Summer 1994;
2. Non-governmental discussions tend to focus on family planning and the environment, although a significant part of the conference business involves migration and refugee affairs;
3. The document so far reflects a shift from the promise of safeguards for the rights and dignity of refugees and migrants expressed in the 1994 Mexico Declaration to a bald assertion of an absolute right of states to control the entry and residence of persons onto their territory;
4. The need to uphold the right of asylum was declared by all governments at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in June 1993 and was declared by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to her Executive Committee in October 1993;

1. CCR Resolution 6, May 1993, called on the Canadian embassy in Ankara to recognize the risk to the lives of Kurdish refugees and expedite their resettlement in Canada;
2. There are approximately 400 Iraqi refugees identified by the UNHCR who are living in wretched conditions in camps in Turkey even though they were accepted by Canada over one year ago;
3. Medicals are beginning to expire as a result of the long delays;
4. These people have not been considered for resettlement in other countries because of their acceptance by Canada;
5. Tension in camps is rising and there is fear of refoulement;

1. The United Nations persuaded the Kurds of Northern Iraq to return to their homeland;
2. The current food, medicine and electricity shortages as well as the "double embargo" are all combining to cause great suffering to the people of Iraqi Kurdistan, and to create sentiments of frustration and distrust of the allied forces among some of the Kurds;

1. The government has announced that it will no longer offer full immigrant processing at all visa posts and will centralize immigrant processing worldwide;
2. There is already a limited number of visa posts with full immigration consulars;
3. This creates hardships particularly in affected countries and more particularly creates hardships for women who are restricted financially and socially from accessing these posts;

1. 85% percent of the world refugee population are women and children and the number of refugee children exceeds 10 million;
2. Refugee children are the most vulnerable sector of refugees all over the globe;
3. Refugee girls are persecuted for their gender and refugee children bear responsibilities for childcare and for parenting of younger children;
4. Refugee children suffer regular violations in camps which rarely gain attention and condemnation in the media, including hard physical labour, malnutrition, epidemics, rape and are deprived of adequate schooling and education opportunities;
5. Unaccompanied children and minors suffer detention in many countries;
6. The defense and protection of refugee children has not received adequate attention in educational material and international legal conventions;